“Imaginary space” is a three-dimensional visual awareness that feels different from what you experience when you open your eyes in broad daylight. Imaginary spaces are experienced when you look “into” (as distinct from “at”) a picture for instance.

Empirical research suggests that imaginary spaces have a tight, coherent structure, that is very different from that of three-dimensional Euclidean space.

I focus on the topic of how, and where, the construction of such geometrical structures, that figure prominently in one’s awareness, is implemented in the brain. My overall conclusion—with notable exceptions—is that present day science has no clue.

What is remarkable in this paper? Many many things, here are just three quotes:

– (p. 3) “in the mainstream account”, he writes, “… one starts from samples of … the retinal “image”. Then follows a sequence of image operations […] Finally there is a magic step: the set of derived images turns into a “representation of the scene in front of you”. “Magic” because image transformations convert structures into structures. Algorithms cannot convert mere structure into quality and meaning, except by magic. […] Input structure is not intrinsically meaningful, meaning needs to be imposed (magically) by some arbitrary format.”

– (p. 4) “Alternatives to the mainstream account have to […] replace inverse optics with “controlled hallucination” [related to this, see the post “The structure of visual space“]

– (p. 5) “In the mainstream account one often refers to the optical structure as “data”, or “information”. This is thoroughly misleading because to be understood in the Shannon (1948) sense of utterly meaningless information. As the brain structures transform the optical structure into a variety of structured neural activities, mainstream often uses semantic terms to describe them. This confuses facts with evidence. In the case of an “edge detector” (Canny, 1986) the very name suggests that the edge exists before being detected. This is nonsensical, the so-called edge detector is really nothing but a “first order directional derivative operator” (Koenderink and van Doorn, 1992). The latter term is to be preferred because it describes the transformation of structure into structure, whereas the former suggests some spooky operation” [related to this, see the tag archive “Map is the territory“]

The psychogenetic process constrains its articulations through probing the visual front end. This part of the brain is readily available for formal descriptions that are close to the neural hardware. The implementation of the group of isotropic similarities, a geometrical object that can easily be probed through psychophysical means, remains fully in the dark though.